At the heart of the judicial system is the administration of events that allow parties to be heard on civil and criminal matters. This critical component of court management requires coordination of numerous resources including court staff (judges, prosecutors, clerks, probation officers, bailiffs, security, etc.), third-party court partners (interpreters, court reporters, police officers, etc.), and of course the parties and their representatives and/or attorneys.
Currently, most judicial court case management systems (“CMSes”) are maintained to manage court case event schedules and details for court staff and officials. Court case events can include hearings, arraignments, deadlines for submissions, etc. Court case event details can include charge and claim data, plaintiff and defendant data, attorney data, etc. Some courts, in addition to the CMS, provide basic court case information on publicly-accessible passive Web sites. Typically there would not even be a way to easily determine what information is new since last time they searched or what information was recently updated. Parties to a case and their representatives and/or attorneys may be granted access to static case information via such a Web site in some systems upon manual requesting.
Interaction with the judicial system is traditionally quite manual. When the date for a hearing or other event in which parties and their representatives and/or attorneys are expected to participate is to be set or rescheduled, the representatives and/or the attorneys of the parties may be contacted by fax or mail. While a party is generally provided submissions made by the other party's representatives and/or attorneys, it can be desirable to manually check to see if the other party's representatives and/or attorneys have made submissions or if there are any other updates for a case by phone or in person, and then must either manually obtain a copy or have the court fax a copy to them. Other participants in the case do not currently have mechanisms that make specific information changes on their cases available to them directly. As a result, the process of case management is very manual, costly and prone to human error.
As the number of resources involved with a case goes up, so goes the likelihood of scheduling problems—whether due to availability of resources or conflicts between resources and the judicial officer. Under even the best of circumstances, the cost of coordinating these events is great and is generally borne by the courts and litigants. In a time of reduced staff and facilities, the expedient use of the court and its resources is critical to the successful management of justice.
Adding to scheduling complexity, most of these participants in the justice process are frequently on the move. Although many staff members commonly work at their desks, others are often not tied to a single workstation. Judges move between courtrooms—and even courthouses; prosecutors juggle multiple cases and schedules; support staff constantly balance competing demands and schedules; and outside attorneys deal with schedule demands both inside and outside the courthouse.
Last-minute and frequent changes to court schedules and event calendars can wreak havoc on all of these justice process participants. When so many people are on the go, changes to events can be easily missed. People waste time checking schedules, calling their offices, and talking to clerks just to make sure they have the latest case, schedule and calendar information.
Where a person participates in various courts and/or jurisdictions, the amount of manual effort rises multiplicatively.
It is therefore an object of the invention to provide a novel method and system for providing case update notifications.